Dinner with Microsoft

Microsoft comes to the Boston area, like a bad uninvited dinner guest in this guest blog by Mark Northfist.

When you visit Microsoft's web site for New England Research &
Development Center you don't get a sense that it is a part of a 30
year old multinational proprietary corporation with a bad track record
when it comes to user freedom and community support. In fact, the site
could be called hip and sleek, with an emphasis on small teams, the
local community, and innovative research. The site shows pictures of
the new office, which features glass walls that don equations painted on them.
Almost weekly they are featuring meetups for the tech community at
their office, and they are clearly putting money and effort into local
collaborations with MIT, museums, and other organizations. And,
despite laying off hundreds elsewhere in their organization, they are
actively recruiting to their Cambridge office, with an advertisement
campaign that takes over multiple subway stations in the Cambridge
area.

But, we aren't fooled. As one local Blogger puts it, Hey Microsoft, welcome! I know you have a history of anti-trust activities and monopolization, so why don’t you go ahead and show us your friendly new image by taking over every square inch of advertising real estate in Harvard Square!

Microsoft wants to recruit the brightest minds out of the graduate
schools of MIT, Harvard, and other prestigious New England schools and
to provide them with an environment that feels open and similar to an
academic institution. Their claim is that they are 'Turning Ideas Into
Reality.' But what is the Microsoft reality? Treacherous Computing,
Digital Restrictions Management technologies, backdoors, system
updates without your permission, deletion of software without your
permission, non-disclosure agreements, and licenses that attempt to
push the boundaries of international copyright laws to maximize their control over
your devices and to minimize your freedoms.

So, don't be fooled by Microsoft's smoke and mirrors act. Their goal
is to funnel ideas into products that aim to restrict users and that
ultimately hinder the progress of the useful arts and sciences. Their
images of a warm and sharing community with glass on the walls may try
to evoke pure and romantic images of brilliance, such as in the movie
*A Beautiful Mind* when John Nash is depicted drawing equations on the
windows in the Princeton library. But the image of glass walls at
Microsoft evokes a very different image in my mind, such as the first
scene in the *Silence of the Lambs* when Detective Clarice Starling
conducts an interview through a glass cell with the brilliant
psychiatrist and incarcerated cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal
Lecter.

So, think twice before strolling over to Microsoft Research for evening community meet-up session. Dinner with Microsoft is like dinner with Hannibal Lecter, it might provide you with many a stimulating and intellectual conversation, but, you have to ask yourself, what was their real motivation in inviting you over?